This is
entirely
factual. All the characters are - or at least were - real.

You may already know this tale
- or part of it anyway. If so, I hope you will agree with me that it is worthy
of re-telling. If you aren’t aware of this history then you may be surprised.
If it makes you think twice before boarding an aeroplane remember that
everything which took place here happened in the first half of the twentieth
century, when air travel was less sophisticated or reliable than it is today.

Incidentally, I know
that Pearl
Harbour is not spelt like that but I absolutely refuse to use American
spellings!

--------------------------

Eugene is perhaps not
the first Christian name which springs to mind when thinking of Texans but it is
a common enough name and in this case was chosen at the birth, in 1921, after
the newborn’s Father, who was also named Eugene.

When Eugene was just a
few years old, an incident occurred early one morning when the milkman noticed
that the house in which the family lived was on fire! He pounded on the front
door until Eugene’s Mother finally woke up and rushed out of the dwelling with
the boy and the other family members in tow. This might have been considered to
be a traumatic event for a youngster but it was to pale almost into
insignificance compared to that which was to follow some years later.

Like many young men
growing up in America in the 1920s and 1930s, Eugene was interested aeroplanes.
He obtained his pilot’s licence thanks to a flight training programme for
civilians sponsored by the United States Army Air Corps. Enlisting in 1941, just
days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, by 1943 he was piloting Boeing
B-17 Flying Fortresses, those four-engined heavy bombers which helped to
establish air supremacy for the Allies in Europe in the Second World War.

In August 1943, on the
Pacific Island of Espiritu Santu, the B-17 which Eugene was piloting, named
“Yankee Doodle”, suffered a mechanical failure. Already careering down the
runway it was unable to attain the required speed and the take off had to be
aborted. Eugine applied the brakes but they did not respond. The
tail brake was activated but also failed and the Flying Fortress overshot the
end of the runway by 500 feet. Coconut palm tree stumps lay beyond the tarmac
and the bomber crashed against these, crushing its nose, collapsing the
undercarriage and starting a fire. Two of the crew, positioned in the nose, died
as a result of this accident but Eugene managed to escape. He had just had his
second glimpse of a potential fiery death.

Perhaps because of this
first hand experience of an aircraft accident, Eugene subsequently took on the
role of an air crash investigator and, based at Washington DC, flew all over the
United States investigating aviation accidents and incidents. It was during this
time that, incredibly, he was involved in another aircraft accident. This time
he was a passenger on a military flight which crashed and caught fire. Eugene
pulled three men to safety from the blazing wreck: fire and potential death
again.

Despite Eugene’s own
first hand involvement in air accidents and his job investigating the causes of
others, his love for flying did not diminish and after the war he became a pilot
for the civil carrier Pan American World Airways, America’s largest commercial
air carrier at the time. He would often be tasked with flying passenger routes
from New York to Johannesburg or Calcutta, at the time the airline’s two
longest routes.

This brings us to 18
June 1947 and Pan Am Flight 121 from Karachi in India to Istanbul, one leg in a
round-the-world service which the airline had just launched. It was to be flown
that day by “Clipper Eclipse”, a propeller driven Lockheed Constellation
with four 18-cylinder engines.
There were ten crew on board but, on this occasion, Eugine was not piloting the
vessel. Instead he had been designated as Third Officer, which meant he was
effectively a relief pilot, there to take over from the pilot, Joseph Hart, or
co-pilot, Robert McCoy, whilst they were on their rest periods during the long,
ten and a half hour flight. They departed from Karachi at a little after half
past three in the afternoon with an estimated arrival time at their destination
of two o’clock the following morning.

After about five hours
in the air, whilst routinely cruising at 18,500 feet, the number one engine
developed a fault. The
nearest airfield was an RAF base at Habbaniya in Iraq but the Captain did not
feel this military airfield would possess adequate repair facilities for the
Constellation. Nevertheless, he contacted the tower at Habbaniya who reported
that all airfields along the plane’s flight path had closed for the night.
Nevertheless, given the unlikelihood of Habbaniya being able to undertake the
necessary repairs, Captain Hart decided to continue to Instanbul. He shut down
the number one engine and feathered the propellor, rotating the angle of the
blades towards the airflow to reduce drag. The
aircraft could fly on the remaining three engines, although they would need to
work hard in order to maintain altitude.

Some twenty minutes
later, the three working engines were overheating, as the airspeed obtainable
was not sufficient to provide them with adequate cooling. The
only way to try and counteract this was to reduce power but this led to the
inevitable outcome that the aircraft could not keep its height. It began a
gradual descent. Falling gently through 17,500 feet the engines were still
overheating and as the aircraft reached denser air, at around 10,000 feet, the
number two engine - which had experienced several problems in the recent past -
caught fire, lighting up the entire cabin with red light. All suppression
measures failed and with the plane’s situation having deteriorated rapidly,
the Captain pitched it forward in a rapid descent with a view to making an
emergency landing before the fire took hold.

The
flight was now over the vast expanse of the inhospitable and often rocky Syrian
desert
and as they plummeted down, the engine fire spread to the wing. Frightened
passengers on the left hand side of the plane, peering through their windows
facing the bright glow, suddenly heard a sickening crunch. They were horrified
to see the number two engine separate from the wing and fall away into the
darkness like a fiery meteor. The
fuel lines were now exposed and the left wing continued to burn as the Captain
brought the aircraft down fast into the black night for what would have to be a
belly landing.

During the descent
Eugene was in the cabin with the Chief Flight Attendant, Anthony Volpe,
endeavouring to calm the passengers. He knew, this time, that the reaper could
not be cheated. Even so, he tried not to show his certainty of impending
extinction and went along the aisle, hanging on to the seat armrests to keep his
balance, uttering comforting words to the passengers such as “it looks worse
than it is” and asking everybody to keep calm and to ensure their seat belts
were buckled. He even sat next to a young woman who was flying on her own and
told her “everything is going to be alright”.

It was not long before
the plane hit the ground - hard. The
left wingtip made the first contact, then the feathered number one engine
propeller followed by the left wing at the number two engine position. With an
awful wrenching and cracking, the violent impact tore the left wing from the
fuselage near its root. Sliding uncontrollably along the relatively smooth,
hard-packed desert sand, the plane swung violently round 180 degrees to the left
and skidded backwards for a distance of 200 feet, finally lurching to a halt
some 400 feet from the first point of impact. Flames poured into the cabin,
yielding a tremendous heat and those who were able immediately fought for the
nearest egress. A few jumped out but others stayed to help those passengers who
were alive but injured. These were manhandled carefully down to those already on
the ground who dragged them away from the ever increasing inferno. Some were
actually burning and pillows were used to help extinguish the agonising flames.

Working hard to help
the survivors were Volpe, Jane Bray the Stewardess and, unbelievably, despite
facing fire and death at close quarters yet again, Eugene, who was alive! He had
suffered two broken ribs and multiple bruising, yet he remained in the cabin
helping to evacuate passengers. One of these was the Maharani
of Phaltan, an Indian Royal, who had received a head injury and lost some teeth
on impact. She was in a hysterical state but Eugene calmed her, forced open her
broken seatbelt and she was bundled out of the ruptured fuselage and carried
away to comparative safety.

All this time the
aircraft had continued to burn fairly slowly but, suddenly, the wind direction
changed, causing the fire to
engulf the passenger area of the plane. Scrambling away just in time, the last
passenger Eugene pulled out of the wreck died in his arms. The
three surviving crew members ran round the blazing fuselage and remaining wing
to the front of the plane and tried to peer into the cockpit windows.
There they could see the flight crew, sitting at their stations but slumped
over their seats, dead or unconscious. Eugene and the other two frantically
pounded on the glass to try and rouse them but the flames soon drove them back
and there was nothing more which could be done.

Eight passengers
and seven crew members died in the crash and the ensuing fire. Thanks in great
part to the heroism of Eugene, Chief Flight Attendant Volpe and Stewardess Bray,
who were the only members of the crew to survive, 19 passengers also lived,
eleven of whom needed hospital treatment. Now all of them needed rescuing.

Just before the
aircraft hit the ground, Eugene had
noticed a light in the distance. Taking charge as the senior surviving crewman,
the following morning he sent two of the passengers - both English - off in that
direction, whilst he remained with the rest of the survivors. Soon after, nomads
appeared from a different direction. They had heard and seen the flaming crash
in the night and had come to investigate and, it was quite apparent, to loot the
dead. Eugene feigned welcome by shaking hands with the leader but was unable to
communicate further as neither could speak each other’s language. In time, the
nomads went away unable, or perhaps unwilling, to offer any assistance.

Thelight which Eugene had seen just
before the plane crash landed turned out to be a small Syrian military outpost,
which the Englishmen finally reached. From there a small plane was sent to
investigate and Eugene returned in this to the outpost to broadcast a message
which was relayed to Pan Am. The
airline immediately sent a rescue aircraft and in due course all were safely
evacuated. Two weeks later, the Syrian authorities granted permission for
Eugene to return to America where, later, he testified at an Aviation Authority
enquiry in
New York. He and the two surviving crew members were commended for their work
following the crash for "devotion to duty and calmness and efficiency in
the difficult and hazardous experience".

Eugenereturned to flying, the
probability of him being involved in another serious aircraft accident now being
infinitesimally small. Yet, by a remarkable twist of fate almost impossible to
credit, he was! In 1948, while flying out of La Guardia Airport, New York, on a
particularly cold and snowy day, the controls froze during takeoff, almost
causing the plane to stall. This last incident finally rammed home the message
to Eugene: somebody clearly didn’t want him to fly planes! He resigned from
Pan-Am the following year and, completely changing direction, decided to pursue
a new career - writing, particularly for the then new medium of television.

--------------------------

Eugine had escaped death not once but many times. If he had not survived,
television history would now contain an enormous void. We would never have come
to know him by his diminutive name, Gene, we would never have heard of his
surname, Roddenberry and there would have been no creation from him called Star
Trek, cult phenomenon and the most influential science fiction television series
ever.